Calling all NANOG'ers - idea for national hardware price quote registry

Fri Sep 16 23:34:00 UTC 2005

On Fri, 16 Sep 2005 14:48:43 PDT, Matt Bazan said:

> Not sure I buy that line of reasoning.  Hasn't happened in the myriad of
> other consumer product lines that have open pricing.

The key word here is "consumer product".

> Actually, not the case.  CDW and Dell (and all the others) only publish
> their prices for the low end gear that they sell.  Anything else
> requires a call to a rep and establishing a relationship.

"low end".  Quite the overlap with "consumer".  It's pretty easy to find
the "best price" for a Linksys cablemodem.  When the router price rivals
that of a Bugatti Veyron, getting a solid answer is a lot tougher - the converse
of "If you have to ask, you can't afford it" is "Whatever you can afford, is
what you'll end up paying".  There's not enough margin on a $400 PC to be worth
a real salescritter's time.  If it's a $20K server, it's worth a salescritter
to spend quite some time haggling.  And if it's a $10M sale, the negotiations
and tap-dancing will go on for a *long* time....

(http://www.cnn.com/2005/AUTOS/funonwheels/09/16/bugatti_veyron/index.html
if anybody actually cares...)

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